Salmon aren’t returning to spawn in New Brunswick – that doesn’t bode well for New England

The Associated Press reports that the New Brunswick-based Atlantic Salmon Federation, which has been monitoring the Magaguadavic River in that province since 1992, says this is the first year since then that no wild salmon have returned to the river to spawn.

This is not good news for hopes to return the iconic fish to New England. A decade of efforts to return spawning salmon to the Merrimack River in N.H. and Massachusetts was finally abandoned two years ago – all those dams in the way, plus the introduction of striped bass (a major predator of young salmon) proved too great an obstacle to overcome. There is still hope to bring them back to the Connecticut River, but if there are problems in Canada, where salmon have always done better, then that hope may be fading.

The biggest obstacle may be the warming and acidifying ocean, however, since salmon breed in freshwater but spent two to five years of their life growing up in the ocean before returning upriver to spawn. It doesn’t really matter what we do in our rivers if they don’t survive the ocean.

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About Granite Geek

Dave Brooks has written a science/tech column since 1991 - yes, that long - and has written this blog since 2006, keeping an eye on topics of geekish interest in and around New Hampshire, from software to sea level rise, population dynamics to printing (3-D, of course). He moderates monthly Science Cafe NH discussions, beer in hand, and discusses the geek world regularly on New Hampshire Public Radio.

Brooks earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics but got lost on the way to the Ivory Tower and ended up in a newsroom. He has reported for newspapers from Tennessee to New England. Rummage through his bag of awards you'll find oddities like three Best Blog prizes from the New Hampshire Press Association and a Writer of the Year award from the N.H. Farm and Forest Bureau, of all places. He joined the Concord Monitor in 2015.